Astronauts from India, Poland, Hungary launched on first space station mission

By Steve Nesius, Joey Roulette and Steve Gorman

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) -NASA retiree turned private astronaut Peggy Whitson was launched on the fifth spaceflight of her career early on Wednesday, joined by crewmates from India, Poland and Hungary heading for their countries' first visit to the International Space Station.

The astronaut team lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at about 2:30 a.m. EDT (0630 GMT), beginning the latest mission organized by Texas-based startup Axiom Space in partnership with Elon Musk's rocket venture SpaceX.

The four-member crew was carried aloft on a towering SpaceX launch vehicle consisting of a Crew Dragon capsule perched atop a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket.

Live video showed the towering spacecraft streaking into the night sky over Florida's Atlantic coast trailed by a brilliant yellowish plume of fiery exhaust.

It marked the first Crew Dragon flight since Musk briefly threatened to decommission the spacecraft after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to cancel Musk's government contracts in a high-profile political feud between the two men earlier this month.

Axiom 4's autonomously operated Crew Dragon was expected to reach the ISS after a flight of about 28 hours, then dock with the outpost as the two vehicles soar together in orbit some 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.

If all goes according to plan, the Axiom 4 crew will be welcomed aboard the orbiting space laboratory Thursday morning by its seven current resident occupants - three astronauts from the U.S., one from Japan and three cosmonauts from Russia.

Whitson, 65, and her three Axiom 4 crewmates - Shubhanshu Shukla, 39, of India, Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski, 41, of Poland, and Tibor Kapu, 33, of Hungary - are slated to spend 14 days aboard the space station conducting microgravity research.

The mission stands as the fourth such flight since 2022 arranged by Axiom as the Houston-headquartered company builds on its business of putting astronauts sponsored by private companies and foreign governments into Earth orbit.

For India, Poland and Hungary, the launch marked a return to human spaceflight after more than 40 years and the first mission to send astronauts from each of those three countries to the International Space Station.

The Axiom 4 participation of Shukla, an Indian air force pilot, is seen by India's own space program as a kind of precursor to the debut crewed mission of its Gaganyaan orbital spacecraft, planned for 2027.

The Axiom 4 crew is led by Whitson, who retired from NASA in 2018 after a pioneering career that included her tenure as the first woman to serve as the U.S. space agency's chief astronaut. She also was the first woman to command an ISS expedition and the first to do so twice.

Now a consultant and director of human spaceflight for Axiom, she has logged a career total of 675 days in space, a U.S. record, during three NASA missions and a fourth flight to space as commander of the Axiom 2 mission in 2023.

The Axiom 4 mission was previously scheduled for liftoff on Tuesday before a forecast of unsuitable weather forced a 24-hour postponement.

(Reporting by Steve Nesius in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Joey Roulette in Washington; Editing by Saad Sayeed)